Black and White
by threedays
Summary: A missing scene from "Don't Cry for Me, Albuquerque." CONTAINS SPOILERS!


**SPOILER WARNING: **THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CORN CHIPS, ZEBRAS, AND **SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON TWO FINALE!** IF YOU ARE ALLERGIC TO ANY OF THESE ITEMS, PLEASE DO NOT CONSUME THIS PRODUCT!

**  
BLACK AND WHITE  
**_a missing scene from "Don't Cry For Me, Albuquerque_"

The "lucky guy" was a National Geographic video and a bag of corn chips.

Even Marshall knew that Mary knew he didn't have a date. He always cursed himself right at the moment of the lie, because that was when his gaze slipped sideways and when it refocused on Mary a millisecond later, the expression on her face had changed. Sometimes to anger that he would dare tell her a lie. Sometimes to rapt curiosity mixed with disbelief, as if she were looking at a tiger in a zoo and the sign said "Bear" – that's how obvious it was to her he was lying. When she was in that mood, her head tilted like a confused puppy and she studied him like he was a rare exhibit. _The Amazing See-Through Mann._

But the look she got when he said he had a date – the look that was one part _I'm humoring you_ and two parts _why on earth would you tell _that _lie? _– that was the worst look she had. It said she would play along, she wouldn't call him on his fib, but you could bet she was going to be hounding him later on to find out why he felt the need to tell her about dates that never existed.

He left in a hurry after that, and tried to lose himself in the great zebra migration to Botswana. But restlessness kept the volume changing, kept the couch cushions fluffed, kept his shoes on in case he needed to run out again. The information the narrator droned into his ear didn't refocus him the way it usually did. The fact that baby zebras recognize their mother's stripe pattern almost immediately from birth, the fact that zebras punish other zebras for breaking the rules of the herd ... These facts would normally calm him, quiet him, allow him to take his shoes off and stretch out on the sofa to sleep, lost in a misery he was not yet foolish or courageous enough to put a name to, even though his partner carried it around in her pocket all day.

_Zebras have it easy,_ Marshall thought. _It's all black and white for them._ The lame joke barely made him smile, but barely was better than nothing. There were so many gray areas in the emotions he was having, so many places he was better off not going.

Marshall winced when the phone rang just as a lion attacked one of the zebras. He was startled not just at the call but at the emotions that went through him when he heard the ring. Hope. Dread. Something he couldn't quite put a name to that moved him to snatch up the phone so fast he nearly dropped it again.

"Yeah, it's Marshall."

Bobby D. spoke.

White stripes and black stripes blurred before Marshall's eyes. He hit the ground running.

When the car careened into the hospital parking garage, which was the first time Marshall registered that he was in the car and driving, he hit the brakes, realizing dimly he was driving faster than a zebra could run, in excess of 40 miles per hour. The useless facts swam. Useless facts – and uselessness itself – seemed to be all he was made up of. Halfway up the stairs, he couldn't remember where he left the car. Hurling himself through the emergency doors, he already couldn't remember the stairs. Every sense, every instinct, was focused in front of him except for the one nagging, terrible thought that he didn't want to know what was in front of him, that he didn't want to have to find out that the last look she gave him, the one where she was humoring him, that might have been the _last_ look she gave him.

"I'm looking for –" was as far as he got with the harrassed-looking admittance nurse before his eyes fell past her on a blond head being wheeled through a set of double doors.

Later he thought maybe it was possible he ran at speeds faster than a zebra again. Damn zebras all mixed up with the other thoughts in his head, if you could call them thoughts. He kept thinking Mary was going to be pissed at him later. What was she going to think when she learned Marshall was at home watching lions eat zebras while she was busy getting shot?

_God, I hope she gets the chance to yell at me for that,_ he thought as he chased her down the hallway.

Then he caught up to her and saw her and saw the blood and there was no more thinking. Already he couldn't remember the hallway. His hands found her hair, his lips found her cheek, but there was no feedback, no answer, no expressions, humoring or otherwise. His voice started speaking, but he barely recognized the words. His hands clutched at her, tried to physically hold her to his pathetic, banal world of useless facts and pointless arguments.

Then a doctor appeared in his face and Mary was wrested from his grip. He reeled backwards, off balance, crooked. His mind whirled to catch up, but there was no point of reference, no context. He'd gone from zebras and corn chips to blood and oxygen masks and there was no science in which this made sense.

They had a balance, Marshall and Mary. Her wit and his sarcasm. Her boundless energy and his useful trivia. Her white and his black. Without her to balance him, he was too off kilter even to remain standing, and he sank to the floor in tears. He had the terrifying feeling that the gray areas he had been worried about earlier – back when everything, really, was okay, if he'd only known it -- had been eliminated, everything banished to black or white.

The double doors finished their slow swing shut beside him.

That was the problem with black and white. They were separate.


End file.
